Slack is well-known and well used as a leader in team communication. It’s easy to use interface allows teams to quickly communicate about their projects in real time.
In the past, Skype and email were our team’s primary communication tools. While Skype was once a popular messaging system, it’s message sync and connectivity issues result in unreliable communication. Email loses the ability for real-time communication and feels stagnant when trying to coordinate with your team.
Transitioning to Slack
Slack allows our team to engage in effortless, real-time communication. We’re able to easily organize channels based on our projects and individual teams. The file sharing allows our team to easily share their files with team members and it’s sync feature with Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box allows shared links to be synced and easily searchable throughout our channels. Slack allows communication to be light and direct, ensuring projects are progressing as planned.
In a recent update, our team can now better collaborate with Slack Calls by sharing our screens and allowing other team members to sketch their ideas on said screens. Previously, we used Google Hangouts and Screenhero (acquired by Slack now) to handle our multi-user video chats. With Slack offering the same functionality, we can handle all of our team communication in one central hub without continually switching between different softwares, keeping our workflow agile.
How we’ve customized the Slack experience
We’re a global team working across multiple time zones, ensuring all team members are aware of project deadlines along with what is currently being worked on is crucial. As with anything in the tech industry, it’s important to remain flexible and always be looking to improve your workflow and switch tools as needed. However, we’ve found these to be our tried-and-true integrations.
Flow
Here at ThemeHouse we use Flow as our project management solution. Our thoughts on what we like about Flow and what we feel should be improved will be in a future post.
Flow for Slack allows our entire team to keep up with any project updates such as completion of tasks, due dates assigned, and new comments posted. We can link specific Flow projects to the appropriate Slack channel, funneling all our communication and activity into one place.
InVision
InVision App has been our prototyping standard for over a year now that allows for seamless collaboration between team members and clients. With InVision being such an integral tool in our workflow, it was important that we could keep our design communication inline with our messaging system.
Our team now gets real-time updates to InVision projects such as a new or updated screens, comments, and project statuses. The integration has allowed our team to offer fast and easy feedback on all our design projects.
Github
With both developers at our Rockford location and also remote, it became clear fast that having real-time updates from our repositories was crucial in maintaining communication and consistency as a team — no matter how far apart physically we may be.
Now any new commits, pull requests or issue events are all funneled into our project channels.
So far, we’ve enjoyed how agile Slack has kept our team for the last two years. It has removed unnecessary steps of other softwares and streamlined our communication so we can continuously deliver great products for you.
